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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28552986">The Pursuit of Happiness</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrainneSwann/pseuds/GrainneSwann'>GrainneSwann</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Beginnings beyond Endings (Sanditon fanfiction) [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Sanditon (TV 2019), Sanditon - Jane Austen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Death, Epilogue, Happy Ending</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:15:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,418</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28552986</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrainneSwann/pseuds/GrainneSwann</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The things that happen in the next 60-odd years that follow Beginnings Beyond Endings.<br/>Or: The Real Epilogue</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Beginnings beyond Endings (Sanditon fanfiction) [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1755586</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Pursuit of Happiness</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The cemetery on the grounds of Castle Howard was filled to bursting on a damp and overcast spring morning as a large and sorrowful group gathered to lay their matriarch in her final resting place.</p><p>Charlotte had left the world in her sleep not a month after the birth of the newest addition to her large family. She had been surrounded, in those final days, by all the people she loved most and had felt, for the first time since the loss of her beloved Viscount and later Earl after his father passed away in the autumn of 1848, a sense of true peace in the knowledge that they would be reunited in whatever adventure lay beyond the barriers between life and death.</p><p>She had known great love but also great loss in her long life; ten children had entered the world through her body and scores more lives came into being through them and yet she had also outlived two of her children and many more of her grandchildren who been lost to injury or illness that no doctor could cure. She had been ready to go for a long time, had lost her passion for all life had to offer after suffering so many losses in recent years, but had held on for her family needed her yet.</p><p>Her youngest grandson, who, at the tender age of twelve, had been left parentless following the terrible death of his father in the same accident that had taken the life of her husband had been given into her care and only scant months earlier had she finally believed he would survive this world without her. He had a wife and growing family now to turn to for comfort and guidance in her absence and she had finally allowed her soul to feel the burden of her years as she thought back on the sorrows and joys of her life and the lives of many others who had affected or been affected by her.</p><p>George had made what he started on their wedding day all those years ago a tradition as the years passed and their lives went on. He had gifted her new and lovely pieces of jewellery at the births of each of their ten children, at the birth of their first grandchild and on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Sometimes they had been commissioned particularly for her and other times they had been part of the Howard family’s already vast collection of jewels. Such was his generosity and devotion to his Viscountess, that two complete parures had been added to the Howard family’s expansive collection of treasures by the time of his death almost nine years previously. After all, a man in love needed no real excuse to shower his lady in gifts.</p><p>Throughout her life, Charlotte resolutely favoured two sets. She would go on to wear her wedding parure frequently on grand society occasions of personal importance before eventually gifting it to her eldest granddaughter on the occasion of her own wedding. And the other, a beautiful set of pale gold delicately wrought in the likeness of forget-me-not flowers and set with sapphires in pale blue and lilac hues, was often seen atop her head and adorning her neck and wrists and ears at the many more stately affairs they attended as they moved within their society. It was this second set that had witnessed the coronation of two monarchs and numerous royal weddings. This set had remained with her eldest son for the use of the new Countess and their daughters and granddaughters.</p><p>The former though, had been seen on almost every occasion of their return to Sanditon over the sixty years that followed. George and Charlotte had returned to the seaside town but four times after that eventful summer. The first had been for the wedding of Georgiana to the widowed Sir William some six years later and then for the christening of their youngest child for whom Charlotte had stood as godmother almost a decade after her parent’s marriage. They had then not returned for many more years until little Patience Denham stood in the church at Sanditon to wed Louis Babington, the youngest of Esther and Charles’ three children.</p><p>There then followed a second wedding between their grandson Howard Babington and a young woman by the name of Eleanor Whiting in the spring of 1880. That wedding had seen the bittersweet union of two grandchildren in such a way as their grandparents might have known had different choices been made all those years earlier. Eleanor, you see, was the granddaughter of Sidney Parker through the youngest of his children, and though the man had not lived to see it, all who had stood as witness at the ceremony agreed the relationship and the emotional conflict between the two families had been put to rest in the happiest of ways. Indeed, no one, least of all Charlotte herself, could have dreamed a more fitting resolution.</p><p>But Howard and Eleanor’s union had not been the only one between the two families. Their marriage had led to the eventual introduction of William Drummond, the only child of Charlotte and George’s youngest daughter and one of Howard’s many younger cousins, to Miss Eliza Wright, who was the only daughter of Marianne Wright, who was herself the only daughter of the late Eliza Parker.</p><p>Unlike many of her aunts and cousins by marriage, Eliza had been wed to William from the gardens of Carlisle House by special licence at yuletide in 1886 with the bride already heavy with child. Their daughter had been welcomed into the family with the last snows of the new year mere weeks before the death of her great-grandmother.</p><p>…</p><p>Sidney and Eliza’s marriage never did achieve any great felicity, though their relations certainly improved after the departure of the Viscount and his Viscountess as was soon proven by the birth of their daughter, Marianne, two years later. However, fate, it seemed, had deigned not to be kind to Sidney Parker. Though they had slowly begun to grow closer and put the unhappiness of their past behind them, they were not to be permitted any great length of time to settle the affairs of their hearts and move forward together.</p><p>Scarlet fever had struck Sanditon in the autumn of 1829 and claimed the lives of many. Eliza had been among the number struck down by the terrible illness and never truly recovered her good health, though she did survive the fever. She passed away the following spring of a trifling cold and left behind her two young children to the care of their father.</p><p>Sidney, who had finally begun to allow himself to feel affection for his wife, had not accepted her loss well and turned to drink for a time to cope with the mess of his feelings and battered strength. His good sister had, of course, eventually brought him to see reason again and for several years he devoted himself to his business and found pleasure only in his children.</p><p>It had not been until his business affairs took him across the great expanse of the Atlantic Ocean some five years after his wife’s death, that he found any form of happiness again and when he returned, it was with a new American bride who eased the pain in his heart and brought him to smile once more. Philippa Worth was a woman of strong and determined constitution. She proved a healing balm to the troubles of his soul and, throughout their long marriage, gave Sidney three more children. The couple had devoted themselves in their private life to raising the five parker children with care and diligence and each of those children grew into sensible, responsible and caring adults.</p><p>…</p><p>Georgiana’s behaviour had settled as time went on, though it was not due to the influence of Lady Susan and her peers. In truth, it had been the death of the younger Lady Denham that had inspired her newfound maturity. Florence had not survived the birth of her daughter the winter following her arrival in Sanditon and Sir William had been inconsolable in his grief. For those first weeks it had fallen to his household and to their friends to ensure his young daughter was properly cared for.</p><p>Georgiana, in her usual bold manner had quite taken charge of the child’s care and it had been her efforts that eventually drew him from his self-imposed exile. Or rather, it had been the many weeks of pestering the grieving man to acknowledge his daughter and tell her if he and his late wife had decided on a name for their child because it would not do for her grow up thinking her name to be something as ridiculous as Little Mistress as his staff had taken to calling her.</p><p>With time, and Georgiana’s own steadfast, if also impertinent and ever wilful, nature, the baronet had once more ventured to entertain the company of Sanditon’s society and slowly the great depth of his sorrow seemed to lessen and, if it never quite faded away, became more bearable. And as the years passed and his daughter grew, he found himself turning more and more to his friend, for that was what Georgiana had become, for guidance in all those matters in raising daughters that only other women can comprehend.</p><p>She was the one to take Katharine for fittings for new dresses, to teach her to read and write and count and to paint and embroider atrociously. It wasn’t until a fearsome day in the depths a spring storm as he watched his daughter play tuneless chords at the pianoforte that he came to the inspired realisation that Georgiana had so completely woven herself into their lives as to have virtually become his daughter’s mother. And though he still loved and missed his Florence, he found that he didn’t mind Georgiana Lambe’s intrusion.</p><p>Mere hours later he had come to a second realisation as he watched the lady in question trudge down the sodden driveway through the torrential rain to honour her standing weekly afternoon tea with his daughter. If Georgiana were already acting as a mother would in whatever capacity she was able, what real difference would it make for her to become the girl’s mother in truth?</p><p>The very next day he asked her to join their family and she said yes.</p><p>…</p><p>Esther had a baby girl in the November following the Sanditon Regatta whom she named Henrietta. Her birth had been a difficult one and the couple were warned by their physician that it was unlikely they would have more children and that if they did, Esther might not survive another labour.</p><p>Lord and Lady Babington heeded their advice and endeavoured prevent any further risks to Esther’s health though their efforts proved repeatedly futile. Accidents will happen and Esther fell with child three times more and suffered three miscarriages before, eventually, they were blessed with another son some eight years after the birth of his sister.</p><p>Esther did survive her last child’s birth, but the damage that had been caused by two very difficult pregnancies and multiple miscarriages meant that her ability to conceived had been exhausted.</p><p>The couple were, admittedly, somewhat relieved at this news. The loss of three children they never got to meet had taken its toll on them and their marriage and they had been fearful for many years that the doctors would be wrong. With time though, their mourning of three lost children grew to be less painful and they hose to focus on the joys bought to them by those that were living.</p><p>Esther and Charles remained close friends with both Charlotte and Sidney throughout their lives, standing as godparents to their children and devoted, honourary aunt and uncle to the rest. Of their friends, they were the longest living and, when they died it was at the great old ages of eighty-seven and ninety-five just three scant months after Charlotte.</p><p>…</p><p>It cannot be claimed that Lady Susan was blessed, as her younger friends had been, with more children. Indeed she had not been blessed with so many children as those friends of an age with her.</p><p>Any yet the Marchioness of Worcester was perfectly content with her small family. She doted over her three daughters and was only too proud of the man her son grew up to be. Her daughters all married respectable, well-heeled gentleman, though only her eldest was wed to a peer, her younger daughters, Angela and Harriet, married a successful colonel and a lawyer who were both younger sons.</p><p>Very little could have contained her happiness when her son, who was by then the Marquess himself, married Georgiana Howard who was the third of Charlotte’s many daughters. Had she lived to see it, she would have been equally delighted at the marriage of her eldest granddaughter to young James Howard.</p><p>…</p><p>Tom and Mary went on in much the same fashion as they always had: Tom enthusiastic over everything life had to offer and dreaming up castles in the clouds over this new idea or that, Mary bringing him back to reality with fond exasperation every time his imagination ran away with him. <em>There would be no more of that, thank you.</em></p><p>…</p><p>Despite popular belief, Lady Denham did not outlive them all. She left the world behind almost 90 years to the day after her birth and, as seemed to be her usual wont, did not go quietly.</p><p>Having contracted the same fever which so sapped Eliza Parker’s strength, Lady Denham had delighted, despite her discomfort, in causing all manner of inconveniences for those who waited upon her and even in her final moments was determined to have the final laugh. She declared to all who were gathered, which was unsurprisingly a rather small party given that she had so effectively alienated many who would otherwise have offered some companionship for a dying old woman, that she had, in her will, left the entirety of her fortune to a charity for foundling children with the express wish that Sanditon House be turned into a home and school for their benefit.</p><p>Charlotte had been pleasantly shocked at this development when she read of it in a letter from Esther and thought it exactly the sort of thing Lady Denham would do: deny everyone who wanted a look at her money and give it instead to those who did not know to care for it.</p>
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